A radical returns

John Berger, one of the most influential intellectuals of our time, is back in London for a month-long celebration of his work. At 78, he has lost none of his integrity, idealism or curiosity - and remains a provocative critic of art and life

In the days, indeed weeks, before I meet John Berger, we speak on the phone several times. We talk about his aversion to interviews, which he articulates in such a charming and considered manner, that, before I know it, I find myself sympathising with him. Nevertheless, he agrees to meet me and see where our conversation might lead. It will, he says, be 'a kind of collaboration'. My heart sinks - but it needn't have.

The interview/collaboration duly takes place in Paris, in the home of one of his many actual collaborators, Nella Bieski, a Russian writer. Berger has travelled there from the Haute Savoie, high in the French Alps, where he has lived for three decades. His voice has an odd lilt to it, suggesting that English may now be his second language.

'John,' Nella tells me, while we sit down to a lunch he has prepared from ingredients bought that morning at the local market, 'is utterly unique.' Even if you had never read one of his books, you would not not have to spend too long in Berger's presence for this to become apparent.

From the off, he sweeps you off your feet. Here is Berger on smoking, which he does with the fierce enjoyment of a true addict. 'A cigarette', he says, inhaling deeply, 'is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared you are both in that parenthesis. It's like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.'

For the first time in a long time I wish I was a smoker, but, fagless, my side of the proscenium arch teetering, I listen, slightly mesmerised, trying to keep up with his free flow of ideas and the oddly illuminating tangents he keeps going off on. He shows me a strange-looking fish, given to him by the local fishmonger, who knows he likes to draw them: 'See, a collaboration that emerged from a conversation.'

He looks a good 15 years younger than his age, which, unbelievably, is 78, and possesses the kind of contagious energy and creative curiosity one usually encounters only in the very young or indefatigably idealistic. In this, he reminds me, of all people, of Bono: the same hunger for stimulation, the same easy grace, the same seemingly undimmable optimism about a world that seems for ever to be testing the limits of that faith.

Berger is one of the most influential British intellectuals of the past 50 years, still best known for his seminal book of art criticism, Ways of Seeing, which was published in 1972 and has shaped the thinking of at least two generations of artists and students. From as far back as 1958, though, when he wrote his first novel, A Painter In Our Time, he was dealing with exile and displacement, which, has since become one of the defining political and social issues of our time. His writing ranges across forms and his subject matter varies from Picasso to world poverty, from photography to the plight of landless peasantry. He seems, even in old age, to have retained the curiosity and energy that drove his younger self.

'If you think of many of his contemporaries,' says author Geoff Dyer, whose first book, Ways of Telling, was a homage to Berger's seminal work of art criticism, 'say, Kingsley Amis or John Osborne, they grew old into grumpy, twisted, unhappy people, forsaking completely the idealism of their youth. In avoiding that awful journey to the right his peers took, Berger has also avoided the contemptuousness that often marks intellectuals in old age. His capacity for hope and enjoyment and renewal remain undimmed, because he has insisted on living up to all the values he has expressed in his work.'

How, though, to enumerate, never mind measure, that life's work? As a novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, essayist, poet, film-maker and art critic, Berger has consistently eluded neat compartmentalising, and, though born and bred in England, has always possessed, in his free-roaming gaze, a distinctly European sensibility. As Dyer notes, 'no single bit of his huge body of work really represents him'. His most comparable contemporaries are Umberto Eco or the late WG Sebald, but it is difficult to compare him to any English author of the past 50 years. 'In contemporary English letters,' wrote Susan Sontag, '[Berger] seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.'

Berger's profile, though, has waned of late in his homeland, partly because of the decline of the old Marxist left, of which he was such a vital and singular presence, and partly because of his sojourn in rural France. He has been writing and engaging all the while, of course, and now he will briefly return as the country in which he made his name puts on a month-long celebration of his life and work.

'Here Is Where We Meet' stretches over five weeks at various London venues from 11 April. There will be readings, some by Berger himself, discussions, exhibitions of art and photo- graphy, a retrospective of his films and television work, and panels featuring many of his collaborators, including the novelists Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels and the theatre director Simon McBurney, whose company, Complicite, staged an acclaimed adaptation of his novel The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol.

'His work came into my orbit in much the same way as it came into everyone else's of my generation,' says McBurney. 'I was studying English Literature in the late Seventies and early Eighties and Ways of Seeing was one of the key texts we looked to for elucidation. It was that heady time when everyone was in thrall to Barthes and the French structuralists, this whole new way of looking at art and literature, and Berger, in retrospect, stood out because his voice was absolutely direct, and practical and clear. It was his clarity and, of course, his compas sion, that entered my consciousness and has stayed with me ever since.'

Published in 1972, with an accompanying TV series, Ways of Seeing remains Berger's most famous and widely read work, a slap in the face of the art establishment and an almost sacred text for the two or three art generations of students who grew up under its immeasurable influence. 'It was revelatory,' enthuses Dyer, 'he opened up the world of painting for me. Here was someone who made these boring old paintings of men in ruffs seem suddenly interesting and relevant.'

With his groundbreaking mix of polemic and scholarship, Berger more or less invented what we now call cultural studies, and the provocative political thrust of the book made it, in the words of an aggrieved art critic of the time, 'like Mao's Little Red Book for a generation of art students'.

The young Berger, though, seems to have been more natural outsider than iconoclast. He was brought up 'in an ordinary, middle-class home in southern England', but, from the age of 12, remembers 'feeling like I belonged somewhere else, somewhere not so stifling'. His mother was a working-class woman from Bermondsey, south London, while his father was head of a public department with the Pythonesque title of the Institute of Cost and Works Accountants. It was Stanley Berger who insisted on sending his son to board at St Edmond's school in Oxford.

'My childhood from six to 16 was spent in these monstrous institutions,' he says, looking pained. 'That school in Lindsay Anderson's If was the Côte d'Azur compared to those places.'

He suddenly stands up and beckons me out to the hall, where there hangs a rather severe portrait in oils of his father which he painted, aged 18. 'You can see,' he says, sincerely, 'the great respect I had for him.'

In 1944, Berger was drafted into the army, where he was immediately considered officer material because of his schooling. He refused the commission, to the considerable chagrin of his superiors, and, for his sins, was dispatched to Ballykelly barracks in Northern Ireland. 'I lived among these raw recruits,' he says almost wistfully, 'and it was the first time I really met working-class contemporaries. I used to write letters for them, to their parents and occasionally their girlfriends. It was the first time I wrote publicly in a way and though it was a pretty awful year, I can see now that it was a very, very formative experience for me.'

After the army, he went to Chelsea School of Art, another formative experience spent 'painting, drawing, writing, and talking to Henry Moore'. Suddenly, he had found a place to belong. 'Life,was suddenly so full.' He subsequently taught drawing part-time and began writing art criticism for the New Statesman. 'Until 1954, I'd only ever thought of being a painter, but I earned my money when and where I could. You could say I drifted into writing'.

Though he was a consistently provocative critic, writing about art from an avowedly Marxist perspective, it was not until the publication of his first book that Berger realised he was still an outsider, even within the broad church that was the British Left in the Fifties.

Written in 1956, A Painter of Our Time concerns a Hungarian emigré who returns to Budapest during the uprising of that year. It ends with the narrator, also called John, admitting that he had no idea on which side the protagonist pledged his allegiance, though he probably fought against the rebels. Such was the furore that this political heresy caused among the left of the time that the book was withdrawn just two weeks after publication. Writing in this newspaper, Stephen Spender claimed that it 'stank of the concentration camps' and could only have been written by one other person - Josef Goebbels.

'Incredible!' says Berger now, smiling ruefully. 'I mean, the book emerged out of the experience of living among a group of European political refugees from fascism who each had their stories from Budapest, Berlin, and Vienna. Suddenly, I was seen as justifying the Red Army tanks as they moved into Europe.' He shakes his head. 'The irony is, of course, that in '68 I was actually in Prague when the tanks rolled again, with some messages of support from the West for supporters of Dubcek.'

The experience left the young Berger chastened to the point where he was unsure if he would ever write another book. In 1972, though, he came into his own in spectacular fashion. The controversial success of Ways of Seeing was followed by his sole excursion into post-modernist fiction with G, an experimental novel that won him the fledgling Booker Prize. Long before the stage-managed hysteria that now surrounds the Booker, Berger created a storm of controversy by using his acceptance speech to castigate Booker McConnell for their historical trading interests in the West Indies, then announced that he was donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. One of the Panthers accompanied him to the event, he admitted later, and, ironically, seemed rattled by the passionate intensity of Berger's speech, whispering 'Keep it cool, man, keep it cool' throughout.

In the wake of all this outrage, Berger briefly enjoyed - endured might be a better word - a brief infamy as the undisputed king of a certain kind of British radical chic. Bruised by the experience, he decamped to rural France, where he has remained ever since. He rejects the term exile: 'For me, it was a choice. I have never had any of the homesickness or suffering that goes with exile, not even an echo of that experience.'

He seems to welcome everyone into his world on an equal footing. Dyer recalls a dinner chez Berger where he was sat between the local plumber and Henri Cartier Bresson. 'When critics refer to John as a democratic writer, they are only touching on a bigger truth: he is a democratic person. The notion of a hierarchy, social or otherwise, is anathema to him, which may be why he left England.'

I ask if he had decided, back then, to retreat from his own reputation, which, for a brief time, seemed to have burgeoned beyond his control. He gives this some thought. 'Well, lots of my friends and political comrades thought that at the time. I remember one person in particular literally grabbing me and saying, "What the hell are you doing? You're not even old".' He laughs. 'But it was never that at all. It was more to do with finishing A Seventh Man, and suddenly realising I didn't know enough about the people I was writing about, about the actual experience of what you might call poor village life. In fact, the kind of conditions of which I was ignorant were the kind of conditions the majority of the people were living in. Still are, in fact. And those conditions have worsened considerably. Reading does not really help you understand those conditions, or find out how these people live. One has to experience it first hand.'

There are those on both the left and the right who viewed Berger's move to rural France to immerse himself in peasant life as a kind of inverse social climbing, the epitome of a certain kind of posh lefty slumming. His champions, though, see it as another example of his commitment to, as Dyer puts it, 'hacking the truth from the earth with his bare hands'. Berger, typically, is more matter-of-fact: 'I went there to learn and to listen in order to write, not to speak on their behalf. I wanted to touch something that had a relevance way beyond the French Alps. Far from retreating, I was homing in on a point that touched a nerve bud about a very important development in contemporary world history.'

If, like his friend and collaborator, Sebastião Salgado, the great photographer of the exiled and landless, Berger is both a chronicler and witness on behalf of those whose lives would otherwise go unrecorded, the one subject he has consistently avoided is himself.

We know that he lives with his second - or is it his third? - wife, Beverley and that his youngest son, Yves, lives in the same village. His other son, Jacob, is a film-maker and his daughter, Katya, a film critic. They sometimes feature in his books as travelling companions, voices to bounce off, but one could not imagine John Berger writing a straight memoir or autobiography.

'The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life. I suppose I have always followed my instincts, and my instinct has led me to these people's stories. Or, perhaps, their stories have found me.'

So you are a receptor for other people's experiences? 'Yes! That's it. I think I'm very permeable. I can very easily, without even choosing to do it, enter the life of another. Or, to put it in a more modest and accurate way, for that life to enter mine.'

Berger's new book, Here Is Where We Meet, is a series of stories about the dead, in which his mother returns to haunt him in playful fashion in the first chapter. Mortality is a late theme, most poignantly articulated in 'To The Wedding', published in 1995, which he was writing when he discovered his daugher in law was HIV positive.

Simon McBurney, who is collaborating with Berger and Anne Michaels on a forthcoming performance, Vanishing Points, says: 'Everything John writes comes from experience. He has a capacity to go somewhere very deep in his work, to go very far into whatever experience he writes about. That journey is often made at considerable cost to himself and can cause him to go into very dark places, from which he finds it difficult to return. It's an attachment to the subject, a kind of creative immersion that is unique. I believe he is the most compassionate writer of our time.'

If he had to be judged, Berger says, it would be on A Seventh Man, which remains his most prescient work. 'A moment of satisfaction that stands out for me as a writer,' he says, 'and has nothing to do with prizes or anything like that, that moment was in Istanbul, when I went to a shanty town with some friends to visit someone they knew. In the shanty, we had tea, and there were about 20 books on a shelf made out of rough planks and A Seventh Man, in Turkish, was among them, and I thought how lucky I was to be a writer. The experience in the book had reached the experience of life, and was accepted, and gave word to it'.

There is a sense, though, that much of Berger's work stands as a testimony to what we have lost. Not just with the break-up of the British left, which provided the key oppositional context for his early provocational writing, but in the sense that we have no one younger writing with the same clarity and such compassion about art and politics and culture, and the mess we are in as party politics has congealed around the dull consensus of the centre-right. The drift towards specialisation has also meant that writers no longer tend to embrace such a range of forms in order to express the full breadth of their vision, the full weight of their beliefs.

'What seems to have been abandoned of late,' he tells me at one point, sounding, for the first time, regretful, 'and what is absolutely fundamental to all we have talked about, is the notion of solidarity. And it is not only to gain something that we should seek solidarity, because solidarity, in itself, is a meaningful quality, that is to say, a quality that gives meaning to life, which makes sense of life. So, I hope it's there in my work.'

It's there of course, in abundance, a reminder of what those of us who still adhere to a liberal-left world view have lost, have surrendered, and must surely rediscover if only in order to be heard.

· 'Here is Where We Meet' begins with readings and discussion at the South Bank Centre on 11 April. For details, visit www.johnberger.org